Design, deconstruction, and development details of our indie RPG!

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of April 6, 2015

As hinted last week, it’s Tango’s portrait collection, drawn as always by Flora!

The bard Tango Moonlight is sort of Dreamblazers‘ narrator—the eyewitness account who’s relating the tale of everybody’s bravery! Of course, sometimes he’s prone to exaggerate his own role… he’s not an especially talented fighter or adventurer. =P But the beauty is that he doesn’t have to be: as long as he can strengthen the good fighters with his magic, he’s making all the contributions he needs to.

Other than Lucky, who’s a non-humanoid character, our range of characters for these portraits is now concluded—but not our range of faces! Most characters will receive at least a couple additional faces in the future as time permits.

In other news, I’m hoping to put up a bonus post later this week because the overworld tileset is finished! …but it’s not yet organized into a cohesive tileset, so I’m unable to play around with it until that process is complete. (I don’t know whether it’ll happen this week or not.) For now I’ve temporarily suspended my judgment on whether I can handle drawing maps for my game since this new tileset does look simpler than the previous one, so I’m certainly hoping I’ll be able to update the continent of Miharu to use the professional tiles. :D

Speaking of which, updating that continent will also signal two big upcoming events:

1) Going public on the ORK Framework forums.

I mentioned wanting to do this a while back when the title image was first drawn, but I’ve waited because I also thought I should be able to show off some in-game assets along with it. My writeups are ready, so the assets are the last missing piece.

2) The search for more artists!

There’s still so much more to do on the pixel art front outside of environments that Becca suggested she could put out a call to arms to her myriad pixel artist followers. That sounded great to me, but I did believe it would be best if we held off until I could at least show off one mostly-finished location to give the artists for characters and monsters and everything else a visual of the world that they’re adding to.

Yes, I still believe what I’ve said that one of my biggest mistakes was not pursuing artists months earlier than I have… but I’m treating that as a sunk cost rather than trying to rush now to compensate.

As the time comes for at least one more pixel artist and likely at least two more, I’m filled with both excitement and trepidation. Teamwork is a wonderful process, but an involved and complex one as well. I’ve spent many an hour pacing back and forth in the hall, trying to put in words for myself what I want from a character design or a pixel art concept—because these are the realizations of my dreams, after all, but unlike the gameplay and the story, I’m not the one directly creating them. In many ways it’s tougher than directly creating them. In the end, I just hope deeply that everyone I team up with feels the same sense of progress and dreamblazing that I do.